Advances in wireless network coding for IMT-Advanced & beyond

In a classical network, data streams originating from a source and intended to a desired destination are routed through intermediate nodes before reaching their final destination. By contrast, Network Coding (NC) manipulates at an intermediate node those data streams by combining the data from the streams before forwarding it to the destination. This paper describes the advances of NC in wireless communication for IMT-Advanced and beyond. A short overview of NC in wireless communications is given first. Afterward, the application of NC to broadcasting is described. Thereafter, NC methods in uplink wireless communications, such as User Grouping (UG) and Relay Selection (RS) are described. Further, the advantage of non-binary over binary network NC is shown in a multi-user multi-relay scenario. Finally the performance of NC is analyzed. In particular, in the uplink Multiple Access Relay Channel (MARC) scenario, the joint UG and RS methods lift the system capacity by 70%. The non-binary NC improves the SNR up to 4 dB. Finally the efficient broadcast method yields up to 22% overhead reduction compared to ARQ.